#yves for his friend so she can have some peace finally .. etc etc. it’s really about ween

[swordmaid]

tav shri’iia is THE canon for me obvi but I also really like the idea of tav wren with yves still being part of the dead three as bhaal’s chosen. the thing with wren is that he was yves’ childhood friend who was pursuing his bard career and severely flopping. one night when he was supposed to escort yves home from the graveyard he chose to perform in some tavern instead, and that night is when the bhaalists came and killed her. for him, one of his closest friends just went missing the night he was supposed to look after her, and when she returns 2 weeks later all beaten up and bloody with no memory of herself ofc he felt guilty….! and he couldn’t even bear to look at her because it’s all his fault u know … if only he didn’t ditched her maybe this wouldn’t have happened so one night he just decides to leave bc he couldn’t take it anymore. it’s always been his dream to be a travelling bard anyway and maybe his career will pick up in some other city than baldur’s gate, so he leaves her and his home and sets out to salvage what he can of his career. and in the most part he was mildly successful. he also ends up making a pact with some fae and they help with his bard career too lol but the guilt of yves is still in his mind- he just got better at ignoring it.

SO. imagine his surprise when he gets tadpoled and goes to moonrise to find a cure and he sees his friend - the girl that’s been haunting his dreams and the source of his guilt and shame - a part of the evil cult that’s been enslaving people with parasites. and now he’s meant to kill her? but how could he when he’s the one who left her behind and maybe it’s his fault that she turned out like this … but anyway I love the idea of wren being like noooo that’s NOT yves she would never do that!! and they’re just like girl ur delusional ur friend is literally chopping people up forcing us to find the parts like some treasure hunt

#but durge era yves is so similar to glados to me where she is so mild about everything and instead of forcing you to test #she forces you to figure out the murder mysteries around the lower city and present ur case in the murder tribunal #like as she says. the only thing better than murder is getting away with it and what’s more fun than to watch someone figure out the puzzle #you set for them u kno 🤭🤭 #and her proposition to ally w her is that she wants u to figure out the whole absolute ploy and how it started and what role she plays #and the only way to get those answers is to break in gortash’s place which betrays his trust … so it’s like a fun whodunit for her..!! #also i think wren finds out what actually happens to her that night .. learning that his real friend died and got replaced with this other o #other one who’s essentially just wearing her skin … reconciling with the truth that if he was with her she would’ve lived … killing this #yves for his friend so she can have some peace finally .. etc etc. it’s really about ween #wren*s survivor’s guilt bc I like to imagine they had another friend who he left with to look after yves #and when he finally returned after how many years he learns that friend has been dead (bc yves killed him) and allegedly yves’ mental #health went downhill when their friend died so she had to be sent away #which in truth she just left for the bhaal temple lol #anyway just thinking abt this three.. def wanna do a wren playthrough one day ..!! #also their other friend’s name is pan (full name xaphan) and they’re a tiefling but idk abt their appearance yet #making them a tiefling so yves’ first kill post lobotomy links back to her og friends where - if #it’s alfira she’s a bard like wren and tiefling like pan … but honestly pan could be Dragonborn too if she ends up killing quill lol #shut up about bg3. #bg3

[iedrajotte]

Assignment example

Slug: CASAMANCE Story Summary: *2 Day Rates* Casamance area of Senegal :  villages, river, etc. Desk: TRA

When: Friday 01/23/2015 08:01 AM    Can time be changed? No

Where: various, see below Casamance, Casamance, Senegal

Contact: Contact phone: Contact e-mail:

Instructions: PLEASE FILE IMAGES BY JANUARY 27TH!!!!!!!!

*CAPTIONS: Please make sure to write detailed, AP Style captions: http://themediajungle.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/ap-style-tips-on-photo-captions/ *

PHOTOS: - Casamance River + motorboats + dolphins + mangroves - Ptit Cassa Diola -  Yves's phone number is 77 545 12 14.  Ptit Cassa but clearly goes by other names. http://www.casamance-tourisme.sn/?Gite-Eringa-a-Haere - Villagers + daily life + sacred drums + religious shrines - Club Med in Cap Skerring - Vines in the ruins of a French depot in Karabane. - Empty beaches in the region such as: Djembering, but any will do - FOOD - Interesting details you see along the way. +++ As always, a variety of scale is needed for stories like this.  Wide landscapes, intimate moments with locals/visitors/businesses.

** SOCIAL MEDIA PHOTOS! Would be great if you can take a few just for Instagram, so please think square format on a small screen. File these (hi-res) with the rest of your edit and let me know your Instagram handle so you can be credited in the caption. DO NOT post these on your own account before the story runs**

Caption Information: ____________________________________________________________ Photographer Assigned: Rajotte,James

Reporter: TBA Will be there? No

Requested by: Blatt,Lindsay email: [email protected]  

Editor: Blatt,Lindsay email: [email protected]   Deadline Date: ________________________________________________________________ Directions: As the low-slung motorboat hummed along the tiny Casamance River in remote Senegal, the promise of a tropical paradise that lay ahead was evident in the dolphins that accompanied us on our journey. I had first spotted them on the overnight ferry from Dakar to Ziguinchor. But here they were within reach, companions who swam alongside the boat, nudging their noses toward an eager crowd of passengers who touched them.

This wasn’t SeaWorld, but my 8-year-old son, my friend Catherine and her 5- and 7-year-olds, and I were all whooping with delight. And we weren’t even close to our final destination, a ramshackle place called Ptit Cassa in Casamance, where Violet Turacos, bright blue plantain-eating birds, could be easily spotted, according to a birder I knew.

Casamance is literally and metaphorically a country away from busy, worldly Dakar. The north is dry; the south is lush. The north is a major African hub; the south is rural African backwater. In between them lies The Gambia. We fell asleep in a big modern city fighting off the encroachments of the desert and woke up in a mangrove-lined river so rich with life that fish flopped out of the boat’s wake as if in some Biblical parable. The dolphins had followed them.

Casamance was at the forefront of the ecotourism movement from the beginning — French tourists paid to help out in villages there from the early 1970s right up until a separatist movement began in 1982. There were luxurious accommodations — travel resorts in Cap Skerring on the coast, and quality hotels in Zinguinchor.

The spectacular richness of Casamance has come at a price. Senegal is a beacon in West Africa—a model of peace and prosperity since its independence—but the civil conflict in Casamance, though slowburning, has taken between three and five thousand lives in the past 30 years. The Diola, who live along the river, are famous resisters, first of Islam, then of the slave trade, then of the French colonists. The Diola Queen Aline Sitoe Diatta who refused to accept the French rice tax was exiled to Mali in the 1940s; they could ship off her body but her spirit remained. Schools, ferries, hospitals, stadiums—all bear her name. The separatist movement is little more than a continuation of a history that has been ongoing for a millennium, the history of the Diola saying no to the power of outside forces.

Traveling through the area today is a full of grim reminders of an earlier golden age that the movement disrupted. Glamorous hotels, now abandoned, have grown over with vines beside tiny villages along stretches of mangroves. Abandoned airstrips now field barbets and red-cheeked cordon-bleus. It was the sort of setting that would change the minds of idealists who bemoan tourism and the development it brings. Locals stopped us regularly, saying “Tell everybody it’s safe to come.”

Some have bought that message. There has been a small resurgence in recent years, people drawn by miles of spectacular, empty beaches on the southern coast. The Club Med in Cap Skerring reopened in 2010. Still, whole hotel complexes held single groups of French sportsfishermen, who would happily share their enormous and hugely varied catches with us for dinner. They couldn’t eat it all.

The actual business of travel — getting from one place to the next and finding food and lodging there—is a bit of a gamble, especially with children. Still, from Le Perroquet, our hotel in Ziguinchor, Cath and I could organize whatever boats we needed to move us around the river. Bad infrastructure can make for interesting travel. The ruins of a French depot in Karabane had overgrown with vines: the perfect jungle gym. In the marketplace at Elinkine, we rented a sept-place vehicle, so called because it has seven places to sit. One of the women in the market did the math: two adults plus three kids plus one driver equals one vacant spot. She asked if we would mind if she rode with us to the next village. Sure, why not? Only then did she bring out the four large baskets of fish she was carrying with her. Strapped to the roof—I would later see a live pig strapped to the roof of a sept-place—the fish did well enough until we hit a bumpy stretch of road, when they started tumbling off, fish juices dribbling through the window. The kids found this hilarious. We all trundled down the road singing “It’s raining fish” to the tune of “it’s raining men.”

For all the natural riches that the region was once known for, its biggest asset is likely the villages themselves. The Casamance region is almost entirely animist. Each village has a set of sacred drums with which they communicate with the other villages. The religious shrines are collections of objects which nobody will explain, no matter how you ask, because their power is bound up with their secrecy.

The kids found ways of amusing themselves, too. Boys and girls coming back from school provided instant community. The Canadian and the Senegalese children were both in French immersion—for different historical reasons—so they chatted about what children chat about: television and who can run fastest. The girls skipped rope. The boys wrestled in the dirt. The adults moved through a landscape of differences, the children through a landscape of similarities.

Nowhere was that dichotomy more obvious than when we reached Ptit Cassa. After the boat took us North for an hour, we arrived at a tiny village tucked deep in the mangroves, and headed off into the jungle. Almost immediately, we stumbled into a clearing, where 10 men sat around preparing and imbibing palm wine—the soft delicious liquor used in several sacred rites. It’s fair to say they hadn’t expected a bunch of white children and their parents to disturb them. Nonetheless, they were extremely generous to us. We all tasted the wine, which they had just harvested. They offered my son one of their many dogs. They offered Cath’s daughter a baby Senegal Parrot just taken from a nest. It took a lot of effort on our part to explain why the kids couldn’t keep them.

At the end of our hike around Ptit Cassa, what we found was, in some ways, more unexpected than the villagers: a kind of restaurant run by a self-described “hippie” names Yves Lanneau. He had moved to Casamance 10 years earlier, and married a local woman, Josephine. He prepared for us the best salad I have ever consumed—French mustard with a local basil-like herb that was intoxicatingly savoury.

And then all of us sat there chatting, for the whole day, about politics, about what makes a really good vinaigrette, about how life zigs and zags. One of the reasons I had brought my son to Senegal was to show him that life isn’t one big air-conditioned Toys’r’us. I ended up showing him the commonness rather than the difference. The children played with the parrot—our compromise had been that they could have the bird as a pet until we left.

I never did see the Violet Turaco.

As we left Djembering the next day, we were stopped by soldiers. They didn’t look much like soldiers, but that’s probably because they were swimming naked in the river. The guide manning our pirogue hastily tossed us the regulation lifejackets and told us to find our passports, as the two young men stopped their frolicking and swam over to inspect us. They quickly decided that we were probably not separatist rebels, and waved us past.

Cath and I started laughing: it was the strangest military checkpoint either of us had ever passed. The children overheard the word “military” and joined in: “That was the army?” The children had found the presence of the military mostly hilarious, although the jeeps on patrols with their huge 50-caliber machine guns were impressive enough.

We were all laughing but the guide was not. He relaxed only when we had passed out of the swimmers’ view.